Quote

Ever since I started doing television, I tended to get cast, for the most part, as these strong, intelligent women... Which is wonderful, but very rarely do I get to be the goofy girl that I am.

I'm no sexual siren. I see prettier girls than me in the grocery store every day.

My shows are about the complete woman who swallows it all. It's a question of survival.

Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producers who call me, who negotiate what we're going to say, is a woman.

I don't like the idea of playing a one-dimensional character who is just fearless, strong, and killer and has instincts and just thrives in dangerous circumstances - that's really boring to me, and I don't think it represents what most women feel inside.

I started off in drama, and there are so many women that I admire. Women in this industry are gladiators. Cicely Tyson, Viola Davis, Taraji Henson, Regina Hall, Regina King.

I think there have always been funny women, from Carol Burnett to Joan Rivers. When the audience sees a woman, they innately know she's worked twice as hard to get there, she's had to prove that she can be the leader, first, and then be funny on top of it. She has to emit a confidence that she's in control.

An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything.

I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.